A question for the emergentists among you
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A question for the emergentists among you
 
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What's the point of determining whether a phenomenon is emergent or not? What useful stuff can I actually do with that knowledge?
In other areas of my life, classification can have actionable consequences. For example, I can use the sophisticated pattern-matching algorithms and heuristics embedded in my brain to work out that the three animals wandering through my house can be categorized as "cats" and not "dogs". And that is useful, because it tells me that I should buy cat food and not dog food when I go to PetCo.
So what is an equivalent example with emergence? Once I've attached the "emergent" label to a phenomenon, then what? -- Robert
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
Re: A question for the emergentists among you
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Robert,
It's supposed to be *my* job to ask embarrassing practical questions. The answer, of course, is to provide a vehicle around which to hold at-length discussions on whether, or not, the term "emergence" applies to said phenomenon. Silly. You should have known that. --Doug On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 7:58 AM, Robert Holmes <[hidden email]> wrote: What's the point of determining whether a phenomenon is emergent or not? What useful stuff can I actually do with that knowledge? ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
Re: A question for the emergentists among you
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In reply to this post by Robert Holmes
Robert:
House guests, but let me take a quick whack at this. Before the recent "epigenic" revolution we focussed only on which genes we had, not on the arrangement of timing of events during development. It's example, I think, of the heurism of the emergentist viewpoint.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
Re: A question for the emergentists among you
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In reply to this post by Robert Holmes
Doug,
Thou protests too much.
You know the story of the two monks from an austere order that were walking in the woods and encountered a damsel at the banks of a muddy brook. One of the monks picked her up and put her across the brook. The damsel thanked him and the two monks continued on their walk.
After a few moments of silent walking, the other monk, said to the monk who had helped the woman, "you know, brother, our order forbids us to have any contact with women."
"Contact?" Said the first monk. "I put her down a hundred yards back; you carry her in your arms still!"
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
Re: A question for the emergentists among you
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Administrator
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In reply to this post by Robert Holmes
On Oct 10, 2009, at 7:58 AM, Robert Holmes wrote:
> What's the point of determining whether a phenomenon is emergent or > not? What useful stuff can I actually do with that knowledge? > > In other areas of my life, classification can have actionable > consequences. For example, I can use the sophisticated pattern- > matching algorithms and heuristics embedded in my brain to work out > that the three animals wandering through my house can be categorized > as "cats" and not "dogs". And that is useful, because it tells me > that I should buy cat food and not dog food when I go to PetCo. > > So what is an equivalent example with emergence? Once I've attached > the "emergent" label to a phenomenon, then what? > > -- Robert My interest is pretty theoretical. I'd like to reduce it to some sort of formal setting, like computer science does with its three classes of computing devices (FSA, Pushdown Automata, TM), then see if I could discover simple properties of "complex" systems, emergence among them. As an example: Emergence could be a computational complexity class .. one that has has no "short cut" towards "solving" it. Game of Life is often used as such an environment. It has several trivial initial conditions that are pre-computable .. i.e. you can analyze the system and predict the result before running it. But this is not true in general. Finding the conditions separating the two would be useful. A similar thing happened to me at Sun: we were trying to build an event distribution scheme for an early window system that would work well in a multi-tasking environment (unix). It was really slow. One of our team spent time resolved that its computational class was non- polynomial. We started over. I hate to say it but as much as I despise the flower child philosophic, I've gotten some interesting ideas out of the book. The difficulty is the signal to noise ratio is pretty poor. -- Owen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
Re: A question for the emergentists among you
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Robert's original question was "What's the point of determining whether a phenomenon is emergent or not?" I don't think there is a point. That's not the issue. The point of the discussion is that some properties seem to exist at a macro-level (every time I use that word now, I worry that Glen will attack me for it) but not at a micro level. If that is a frequently occuring phenomenon, it makes sense to ask whether there is something common to all instances of such phenomena. I think that's the point of the discussion. It's really a matter of scinece: here are a number of somewhat diverse phenomena that seem to have something in common. Can we come up with a characterization of what it is -- and if so does that offer any insight into how the world works?
-- Russ A On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 10:26 AM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
Re: A question for the emergentists among you
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In reply to this post by Robert Holmes
Hang on, Owen, There is an excluded middle, here:
OD wrote =====> hate to say it but as much as I despise the flower child philosophic, I've gotten some interesting ideas out of the book. The difficulty is the signal to noise ratio is pretty poor.<===== OD wrote John Searle? "Flower Child?" Hempel and Oppenheim, "Flower Child?". There is a whole lot of philosophy between "flower child" and reducing thought to a formalism. What => I < = dispise, is the bad habit some have of pushing some intellectual fare off the table on the ground that it is not nutritious, when the plain fact is that they just dont have the taste for it. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University ([hidden email]) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ > [Original Message] > From: Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]> > Date: 10/10/2009 11:26:11 AM > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you > > On Oct 10, 2009, at 7:58 AM, Robert Holmes wrote: > > What's the point of determining whether a phenomenon is emergent or > > not? What useful stuff can I actually do with that knowledge? > > > > In other areas of my life, classification can have actionable > > consequences. For example, I can use the sophisticated pattern- > > matching algorithms and heuristics embedded in my brain to work out > > that the three animals wandering through my house can be categorized > > as "cats" and not "dogs". And that is useful, because it tells me > > that I should buy cat food and not dog food when I go to PetCo. > > > > So what is an equivalent example with emergence? Once I've attached > > the "emergent" label to a phenomenon, then what? > > > > -- Robert > > > My interest is pretty theoretical. I'd like to reduce it to some sort > of formal setting, like computer science does with its three classes > of computing devices (FSA, Pushdown Automata, TM), then see if I could > discover simple properties of "complex" systems, emergence among them. > > As an example: Emergence could be a computational complexity class .. > one that has has no "short cut" towards "solving" it. Game of Life is > often used as such an environment. It has several trivial initial > conditions that are pre-computable .. i.e. you can analyze the system > and predict the result before running it. But this is not true in > general. Finding the conditions separating the two would be useful. > > A similar thing happened to me at Sun: we were trying to build an > event distribution scheme for an early window system that would work > well in a multi-tasking environment (unix). It was really slow. One > of our team spent time resolved that its computational class was non- > polynomial. We started over. > > I hate to say it but as much as I despise the flower child > philosophic, I've gotten some interesting ideas out of the book. The > difficulty is the signal to noise ratio is pretty poor. > > -- Owen > > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
Re: A question for the emergentists among you
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In reply to this post by Robert Holmes
All,
Following wimsatt, the puffiness of pancakes is emergent because it depends on the order of mixing the ingredients. You mix the dry ingredients together, you mix the set incredients together and THEN you mix the wet with the dry. Similarly, with a bread maker you dont want to mix the yeast with the salt, or with the water, in the first instance.
If you are making pancakes from a recipe, because text is linear, the steps always appear in an order. For instance, most start with the flour and then add the baking powder and the salt, then the sugar, etc.. For pancakes, the order of these steps does NOT make a difference. Similarly, there are spacial instructions that dont make a difference: "In a separate bowl...". it instructs you to mix the wet ingredients, but you can put the sugar and the salt in witht the eggs and the milk and the oil, if you like. Try to add the baking powder to the wet ingredients or to add it AFTER you have mixed the wet and the dry, and you have trouble.
It is these sorts of facts that make the puffiness of pancakes an emergent property, and knowing on which sorts of temporal and spatial arrangements the emergent properties of a meal depends is what makes a flexible and skillful cook.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
Re: A question for the emergentists among you
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Administrator
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In reply to this post by Nick Thompson
To Nick: How about replying to the core observation on a theoretical
approach? Forgive the sentence saying the book is OK. Simply stated, we may come to a better understanding of the notion of emergence by discussion, but we will not take an important step forward without formalization. I don't argue about conceptualizing emergence, even within the philosophic realm. But I do object to not having a final formal/theoretical goal. To FRIAM: how would you answer this question by Dennett: "Are centers of gravity in your ontology?" .. i.e. are they "real", do they "exist"? My answer is that this question primarily exposes one idea: that you must enter into an abstract model of emergence rather quickly for traction. Dennett would agree, he is yet another philosopher fascinated by Conway's Game of Life. The answer is then "yes". -- Owen On Oct 10, 2009, at 12:12 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote: > Hang on, Owen, There is an excluded middle, here: > > OD wrote =====> hate to say it but as much as I despise the flower > child > philosophic, I've gotten some interesting ideas out of the book. The > difficulty is the signal to noise ratio is pretty poor.<===== OD wrote > > John Searle? "Flower Child?" Hempel and Oppenheim, "Flower Child?". > > There is a whole lot of philosophy between "flower child" and > reducing > thought to a formalism. > > What => I < = dispise, is the bad habit some have of pushing some > intellectual fare off the table on the ground that it is not > nutritious, > when the plain fact is that they just dont have the taste for it. > > Nick > > Nicholas S. Thompson > Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, > Clark University ([hidden email]) > http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ > > > > >> [Original Message] >> From: Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> >> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email] >> > >> Date: 10/10/2009 11:26:11 AM >> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you >> >> On Oct 10, 2009, at 7:58 AM, Robert Holmes wrote: >>> What's the point of determining whether a phenomenon is emergent or >>> not? What useful stuff can I actually do with that knowledge? >>> >>> In other areas of my life, classification can have actionable >>> consequences. For example, I can use the sophisticated pattern- >>> matching algorithms and heuristics embedded in my brain to work out >>> that the three animals wandering through my house can be categorized >>> as "cats" and not "dogs". And that is useful, because it tells me >>> that I should buy cat food and not dog food when I go to PetCo. >>> >>> So what is an equivalent example with emergence? Once I've attached >>> the "emergent" label to a phenomenon, then what? >>> >>> -- Robert >> >> >> My interest is pretty theoretical. I'd like to reduce it to some >> sort >> of formal setting, like computer science does with its three classes >> of computing devices (FSA, Pushdown Automata, TM), then see if I >> could >> discover simple properties of "complex" systems, emergence among >> them. >> >> As an example: Emergence could be a computational complexity class .. >> one that has has no "short cut" towards "solving" it. Game of Life >> is >> often used as such an environment. It has several trivial initial >> conditions that are pre-computable .. i.e. you can analyze the system >> and predict the result before running it. But this is not true in >> general. Finding the conditions separating the two would be useful. >> >> A similar thing happened to me at Sun: we were trying to build an >> event distribution scheme for an early window system that would work >> well in a multi-tasking environment (unix). It was really slow. One >> of our team spent time resolved that its computational class was non- >> polynomial. We started over. >> >> I hate to say it but as much as I despise the flower child >> philosophic, I've gotten some interesting ideas out of the book. The >> difficulty is the signal to noise ratio is pretty poor. >> >> -- Owen >> >> >> >> ============================================================ >> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv >> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College >> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org > > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
Re: A question for the emergentists among you
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In reply to this post by Nick Thompson
___ Sent with SnapperMail www.snappermail.com ...... Original Message ....... On Sat, 10 Oct 2009 11:08:04 -0600 "Nicholas Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote: >Robert: > >House guests, but let me take a quick whack at this. Before the recent "epigenic" revolution we focussed only on which genes we had, not on the arrangement of timing of events during development. It's example, I think, of the heurism of the emergentist viewpoint. > >Nick > >Nicholas S. Thompson >Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, >Clark University ([hidden email]) >http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ > > > > > >----- Original Message ----- >From: Robert Holmes >To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group >Sent: 10/10/2009 8:00:42 AM >Subject: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you > >What's the point of determining whether a phenomenon is emergent or not? > >In other areas of my life, classification can have actionable consequences. For example, I can use the sophisticated pattern-matching algorithms and heuristics embedded in my brain to work out that the three animals wandering through my house can be categorized as "cats" and not "dogs". And that is useful, because it tells me that I should buy cat food and not dog food when I go to PetCo. > >So what is an equivalent example with emergence? Once I've attached the "emergent" label to a phenomenon, then what? > >-- Robert > >============================================================ >FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv >Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College >lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
Re: A question for the emergentists among you
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In reply to this post by Robert Holmes
On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 7:58 AM, Robert Holmes <[hidden email]> wrote:
What's the point of determining whether a phenomenon is emergent or not? What useful stuff can I actually do with that knowledge? Well, if you recognized that the animals wandering through your house were a pack of dogs, and not just a collection of individual dogs, then you might save yourself and your neighbors a passel of trouble by finding a full time specialist to manage them. Or you could just turn them out doors to amuse themselves at the expense of the young children and other small animals in your neighborhood.
Meanwhile, Doug can rest easy that his birds will only turn on him with collective malice if he happens to wake up inside Alfred Hitchcock's imagination some morning, because whatever the collective noun for parrots is, it isn't anything like a pack of canids.
-- rec -- ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
Re: A question for the emergentists among you
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I read this entire thread to my psittascenes. None of them had much to say, except, of course, one of the African Greys.
After a moment of deliberation (Opus, the Grey *never* speaks without deliberation) he fixed me with one of his beady little eyes and said, "Ow, Butthead." I emerged from the bird room to ponder this. --Doug On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 2:34 PM, Roger Critchlow <[hidden email]> wrote:
-- Doug Roberts [hidden email] [hidden email] 505-455-7333 - Office 505-670-8195 - Cell ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
Re: A question for the emergentists among you
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In reply to this post by Robert Holmes
Great!
We seem to agree that models are important. You are keener on mathematical models ... that is models that are accompanied by a mathematical formalization ... I am keener than you about models like "natural selection"., where the model space is some phenomenon one feels one understands better than the phenomenon under examination, but in both cases, the procedure is the same ... commit your self to a domain that represents the phenomenon of interest, work within that domain, and then return to the phenomenon to see where you have gotten. I think we need to think hard about the process by which the model comes about in the first place ... the eureka moment, or as popper called it, The Bold Conjecture." Clearly some models are crap and others are very useful. What I think we are doing now is assembling the equipment to generate a good model as a opposed to a crappy one.. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University ([hidden email]) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ > [Original Message] > From: Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> > To: <[hidden email]>; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]> > Date: 10/10/2009 12:47:42 PM > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you > > To Nick: How about replying to the core observation on a theoretical > approach? Forgive the sentence saying the book is OK. > > Simply stated, we may come to a better understanding of the notion of > emergence by discussion, but we will not take an important step > forward without formalization. I don't argue about conceptualizing > emergence, even within the philosophic realm. But I do object to not > having a final formal/theoretical goal. > > To FRIAM: how would you answer this question by Dennett: "Are centers > of gravity in your ontology?" .. i.e. are they "real", do they "exist"? > > My answer is that this question primarily exposes one idea: that you > must enter into an abstract model of emergence rather quickly for > traction. Dennett would agree, he is yet another philosopher > fascinated by Conway's Game of Life. > > The answer is then "yes". > > -- Owen > > > On Oct 10, 2009, at 12:12 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote: > > > Hang on, Owen, There is an excluded middle, here: > > > > OD wrote =====> hate to say it but as much as I despise the flower > > child > > philosophic, I've gotten some interesting ideas out of the book. The > > difficulty is the signal to noise ratio is pretty poor.<===== OD wrote > > > > John Searle? "Flower Child?" Hempel and Oppenheim, "Flower Child?". > > > > There is a whole lot of philosophy between "flower child" and > > reducing > > thought to a formalism. > > > > What => I < = dispise, is the bad habit some have of pushing some > > intellectual fare off the table on the ground that it is not > > nutritious, > > when the plain fact is that they just dont have the taste for it. > > > > Nick > > > > Nicholas S. Thompson > > Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, > > Clark University ([hidden email]) > > http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ > > > > > > > > > >> [Original Message] > >> From: Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> > >> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group > >> > > >> Date: 10/10/2009 11:26:11 AM > >> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you > >> > >> On Oct 10, 2009, at 7:58 AM, Robert Holmes wrote: > >>> What's the point of determining whether a phenomenon is emergent or > >>> not? What useful stuff can I actually do with that knowledge? > >>> > >>> In other areas of my life, classification can have actionable > >>> consequences. For example, I can use the sophisticated pattern- > >>> matching algorithms and heuristics embedded in my brain to work out > >>> that the three animals wandering through my house can be categorized > >>> as "cats" and not "dogs". And that is useful, because it tells me > >>> that I should buy cat food and not dog food when I go to PetCo. > >>> > >>> So what is an equivalent example with emergence? Once I've attached > >>> the "emergent" label to a phenomenon, then what? > >>> > >>> -- Robert > >> > >> > >> My interest is pretty theoretical. I'd like to reduce it to some > >> sort > >> of formal setting, like computer science does with its three classes > >> of computing devices (FSA, Pushdown Automata, TM), then see if I > >> could > >> discover simple properties of "complex" systems, emergence among > >> them. > >> > >> As an example: Emergence could be a computational complexity class .. > >> one that has has no "short cut" towards "solving" it. Game of Life > >> is > >> often used as such an environment. It has several trivial initial > >> conditions that are pre-computable .. i.e. you can analyze the system > >> and predict the result before running it. But this is not true in > >> general. Finding the conditions separating the two would be useful. > >> > >> A similar thing happened to me at Sun: we were trying to build an > >> event distribution scheme for an early window system that would work > >> well in a multi-tasking environment (unix). It was really slow. One > >> of our team spent time resolved that its computational class was non- > >> polynomial. We started over. > >> > >> I hate to say it but as much as I despise the flower child > >> philosophic, I've gotten some interesting ideas out of the book. The > >> difficulty is the signal to noise ratio is pretty poor. > >> > >> -- Owen > >> > >> > >> > >> ============================================================ > >> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > >> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > >> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org > > > > > > > > ============================================================ > > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
Re: A question for the emergentists among you
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Administrator
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I'll buy that: the particular model space may not have to be a single
one. And our readings hopefully will lead to the good ones. A model does, however, have to satisfy Timothy Cowers's notion of abstraction: that after the intuition drives you to an abstraction, you can cut the cord to to the intuition and live entirely within the abstraction. The 10^-1 example: what in the hell does it mean to multiply something by itself -1 times! The abstraction simply says that exponents are added during multiplication and subtracted during division. That lets us also make sense of 10^0 = 1, which drives non-math folks mad! And the abstraction does also have to be constructive: i.e. one can use the abstractions to create new entities within the abstraction. TC's example of a 5-space cube being simply lists of 5 numbers. His example of a unit 5-cube was great: (0 1 0 0 1) as an example vertex. That counting the number of possible 5-tuples of this sort (2^5=32) tells you the number of nodes the 5-cube has. And so on for the edges (all tuples differing by a single digit). This all biases me toward computational abstractions. Besides, its way fun to write programs! BTW: Gowers Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction has gotten great reviews on Amazon. And, sigh, has made me have much more respect for philosophy (blush!). If Russell and Wittgenstein helped Tim to arrive at a Fields medal and deliver the Millennium keynote, it can't be all bad. Hey, maybe our next seminar should use Gowers's two books, both the small and the large (Princeton Companion to Mathematics)! When the PCM gets to its second printing (thus reducing the errata considerably), I definitely will buy it. And there is a digital version, making it easier to work with in a seminar. -- Owen On Oct 10, 2009, at 5:40 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote: > Great! > > We seem to agree that models are important. You are keener on > mathematical > models ... that is models that are accompanied by a mathematical > formalization ... I am keener than you about models like "natural > selection"., where the model space is some phenomenon one feels one > understands better than the phenomenon under examination, but in both > cases, the procedure is the same ... commit your self to a domain that > represents the phenomenon of interest, work within that domain, and > then > return to the phenomenon to see where you have gotten. > > I think we need to think hard about the process by which the model > comes > about in the first place ... the eureka moment, or as popper called > it, The > Bold Conjecture." Clearly some models are crap and others are very > useful. > > > What I think we are doing now is assembling the equipment to > generate a > good model as a opposed to a crappy one.. > > Nick ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
Re: A question for the emergentists among you
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Wow, I post a question, go on a 6-hour hike and this is what I come back to...
I still don't feel that I've got a straight answer to my question, other than Doug's (which I suspect is the most accurate) and Russ's (which I really hope isn't true). So let me try again: once I've established that a phenomenon is emergent by using a yet-to-be developed metric (Owen's formalism) or philosophic enquiry (Nick's & other's approach) - then what?
In fact, let's not limit ourselves to the present situation (because I suspect that the current answer is simply "Nothing. Identifying emergence is an end in it's own right"). What would you like to be able to do once you'd attached the "emergent" label to a phenomenon? What's your best case, your grand vision? Imagine the best of all possible worlds and tell me: what would you want to be able to do once that "emergent" label gets attached?
-- Robert
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
Re: A question for the emergentists among you
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Robert,
Just FYI: You did not get an answer to your question (other than mine, FWIW). Please keep pushing for one, though. I want to hear the answer myself. Don't let them bog you down in words. Settle for nothing less than an actual, concise, precise answer to your very concise, precise, and extremely reasonable question. --Doug On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 8:21 PM, Robert Holmes <[hidden email]> wrote: Wow, I post a question, go on a 6-hour hike and this is what I come back to... -- Doug Roberts [hidden email] [hidden email] 505-455-7333 - Office 505-670-8195 - Cell ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
Re: A question for the emergentists among you
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In reply to this post by Robert Holmes
On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 08:21:08PM -0600, Robert Holmes wrote:
> Wow, I post a question, go on a 6-hour hike and this is what I come back > to... > > I still don't feel that I've got a straight answer to my question, other > than Doug's (which I suspect is the most accurate) and Russ's (which I > really hope isn't true). So let me try again: once I've established that a > phenomenon is emergent by using a yet-to-be developed metric (Owen's > formalism) or philosophic enquiry (Nick's & other's approach) - then what? > > In fact, let's not limit ourselves to the present situation (because I > suspect that the current answer is simply "Nothing. Identifying emergence is > an end in it's own right"). What would you *like* to be able to do once > you'd attached the "emergent" label to a phenomenon? What's your best case, > your grand vision? Imagine the best of all possible worlds and tell me: what > would you want to be able to do once that "emergent" label gets attached? > > -- Robert My very short answer is "compute the (informational) complexity of the emergent thing". That's what I want to do. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [hidden email] Australia http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
Re: A question for the emergentists among you
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Robert, Why do you hope my answer is not true?
-- Russ A On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 10:10 PM, russell standish <[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
Re: A question for the emergentists among you
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Merely an expression of a personal preference: if "there is no point" is true, it tells me that emergence is and can only ever be pure science. As a practitioner, I prefer my science applied -- R
On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 12:22 AM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:
Robert, Why do you hope my answer is not true? ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
Re: A question for the emergentists among you
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By definition science isn't applied. Whether or not new scientific results have application is a different question.
My claim is that understanding the underlying mechanisms of emergence is a scientific question in the same way that understanding the underlying mechanisms of what makes some substances elements and other compounds is a scientific question. Certainly there are applications of that knowledge. But the knowledge itself is simply science. How can it be disappointing if the answer to "what is emergence?" also turns out to be new scientific knowledge? I would find it disappointing if it turns out to be anything else, One of the possibilities for "anything else" is that emergence is something that occurs (only) in our heads and has nothing to do with the observed phenomena themselves. That's the emergence-is-ontological vs. emergence-is-epistemological argument. My position is that emergence is ontological, i.e., that emergence reflects objective aspects of the nature and is not just a matter of how we look at things. -- Russ A On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 7:19 AM, Robert Holmes <[hidden email]> wrote: Merely an expression of a personal preference: if "there is no point" is true, it tells me that emergence is and can only ever be pure science. As a practitioner, I prefer my science applied -- R ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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